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A look at the specifications reveals that the core SoC and memory capacity seem to be similar to the TS-x53 Pro launched last year. However, while the TS-x53 Pro targets the mid-end SMB market, the focus of the TS-x51 is more towards the home consumer side.

HGST aims to fill that space with the 6 TB Deskstar NAS. It falls in the same market category as the WD Red. However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives. In the remainder of the review, we will try to determine whether that is the case.

Assembling your own NAS would net more performance as well because you’d be using a Celeron or Pentium over the Atom or other SoCs, while power shouldn’t be a concern with Haswell using less than 30 watts at idle. As the cherry on top, open source software such as FreeNAS and enclosures like Silverstone’s DS380 should make it less daunting to get started with your homebrewed eight-bay NAS server.

The DiskStation DS214se is Synology’s economical two-bay NAS with the capability to host, share, and protect data and is optimized to be an personal NAS server running the ever incomparable DiskStation Manager (DSM).

The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating four different hard drives targeting the NAS market:

Ars Technica provides a 6 page review of the Synology DS-412+, focusing on features, software, and pretty much everything you’d want to know about any NAS.

Other contenders in the home NAS space include QNAP, NetGear, and Iomega, but I went with Synology chiefly due to their reputation for performance. The DroboFS was the very definition of “easy to use,” but after more than a year the slow read and write speeds just became too much. After scouring forums and reviews to find a replacement, I kept coming back to the then-newly released DS-412+.

Western Digital released a hard drive aimed directly at home NAS users. It should also work great for home file servers, and any server where a 5400 RPM SATA drive is appropriate.

WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).

On May 15th, LaCie launched an updated version of their 2big Network 2 2-bay product, the 2big NAS. The 2big NAS comes in diskless and 6TB versions, priced at $299.99 and $649.00 respectively. At this price point, the NAS competes with advanced 2-bay SMB solutions such as the Synology DS211+, and not the LG NAS N2A2 which is geared primarily towards home users. In this review, we set out to find whether the features and performance match up to the price point.

We have been playing around with the QNAP TS-659 Pro II unit over the last month or so. Based on the Intel Atom D525 platform, it has 6 bays and dual GbE ports, making it a candidate for the high end SMB market.